The First Amendment; Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. This is one of the most important amendments in the history of the world. It could be said that it is the foundation of our country and why people want to live here. The colonists left England in 1620 and came to this land to have free speech, free religion, and to have freedom of the press. Freedom of speech is the most important thing in this world. That is why so many people come to live here. The freedoms of speech, religion, and press gives everyone a new chance to express themselves. No suppression by the government and no suppression by the churches. The First Amendment needs to be preserved for its original intent. The First Amendment is not a weapon and it is not a tool to control people. The press, or the media, has been suppressing people though. They distort the presentation of information to control people's thoughts and behaviors. The press was designed to present only the factual information to the people, nothing fake or misleading. The media does not directly suppress people, they cover the truth by distortion, omission, and falsehoods. They invoke the people of the United States of America to take a side for or against an individual or a group of individuals. The Covington School Protest demonstrates how the media distorts the information the everyday people absorb, which is not permitted under the First Amendment.
The Media has many ways that it distorts the information that we see and hear everyday. One example is how the media turns innocent people into public enemy number one. On January 18, 2019 a sixteen-year-old high school was turned into the most hated person in the United States of America. This young man was at peaceful assembly, exercising his first amendment rights, with his friends when he was confronted by a Native American activist playing a drum. The young man just stood there and smiled at the man. When the media looked at the video they had recorded, they turned a smiling, and a respectful young man listening to the Native American activist play his drum, into a racist, white power, activist who has no respect for other cultures. This was taken from a three-minute forty-four second video that the Media took their stance on. If they had watched, and presented to the public, the full one hour and forty-six minute recording that was taken their argument would have been a much different than the one they had. It was proven that it was a non-racist, peaceful assembly that the class of Covington High School was attending. It was also proven that the black, Hebrew, Israelites protesting group was yelling very harshly at this group of High School boys. The Hebrew group began talking about Donald Trump and Catholics because the group of high schoolers had MAGA hats on, while calling the group of young men “crackers” (Covington School Protests, USA today). Currently the young man has a lawsuit against the media for false representation of him on national television. The media uses many tactics to spark people’s anger for events that have little meaning to them. People are starting to catch on to what is real and what is biased.
The media has several ways of distorting information. The most used technique is bias by omission. Bias by omission is “leaving one side out of an article, or a series of articles over a period of time; ignoring facts that tend to disprove liberal or conservative claims, or that support liberal or conservative beliefs” (Media Bias 5). Another method is bias by selection of sources. Bias by selection of sources is “including more sources that support one view over another” (Media Bias 6). That would create a poll of which pizza is better, pepperoni or plain, and of the people you choose to poll, nine out of ten of them are eating pepperoni pizza at that moment and only one eats plain. That would obviously cause an unfair poll as the majority of sources chosen were biased towards one option. Another type of bias is bias by story selection. Bias by story selection is “a pattern of highlighting news stories that coincide with the agenda of either the Left or the Right, while ignoring stories that coincide with the opposing view” (Media Bias 7). That would be like providing a study that says there is a cure for cancer, but another study proved that the success rate of the procedure is one in a million. Providing a story that makes people feel good is good for publicity, but if they don’t present the other side of the story, like how often the procedure was successful, people would go around spreading false information that has only one side of the story. Another form of bias, commonly used in newspapers or news websites, is bias by placement. Bias by placement is “a measure of how important the editor considers the story. Studies have shown that, in the case of the average newspaper reader and the average news story, most people read only the headline” (Media Bias 8). Most people read the headline and formulate an opinion based on that when later on in the article, the author could disprove the headline based on evidence they had collected. One of the largest types of bias is used by television media every single day. This bias is bias by labeling. Bias by labeling comes in two forms. The first is the tagging of conservative politicians and groups with extreme labels while leaving liberal politicians and groups unlabeled or with more mild labels, or vice versa. The second kind of bias by labeling occurs when a reporter not only fails to identify a liberal as a liberal or a conservative as a conservative, but describes the person or group with positive labels, such as “an expert” or “independent consumer group” (Media Bias 9). The second type of bias can sometimes be avoided if people analyze the articles properly. If someone in an article is described as an expert, and that expert happens to be a conservative, then the assumption can be made that the author is a conservative author. The final form of media bias is bias by spin. Bias by spin “occurs when the story has only one interpretation of an event or policy, to the exclusion of the other; spin involves tone – it’s a reporter’s subjective comments about objective facts; makes one side’s ideological perspective look better than another” (Media Bias 10). To determine the bias’s spin, then one has to evaluate which agenda the article falls under, conservative or liberal. Once that is found then you have found the bias by spin. Both conservative and liberal media sources use these biases. That is the issue with today’s media. Neither side presents the full truth to a story. It is all about their own bottom dollar and not how they affect the lives of those who they report about.
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These biases are not just used by big corporations or only national television, it is used throughout the world. From the largest company to the smallest newspaper, biases are used and create the world we live in now. The title of an article “Ruling Imperils Right To Protest” (First Amendment Coalition title) is false information. Later in the article the author describes that a protest group was not protesting peacefully as a rock was thrown at an officer and injured him. The protest group had every right to protest until they injured an officer. The article was not on national television or in a newspaper, but the title was proven false as the ruling of the court was correct as the protesters did not protest peacefully. In Bath, Maine, a law was put in place that anyone who wanted to perform a protest, had to get permission from the town to protest, pay a $25 fee for the paperwork, and do all this 30 days in advance of the protest. Most protests are not planned, they can happen spontaneously. That law revokes the right of the people to peacefully protest. Also an organization that hosts many events would be excluded from this law as they host many events throughout the year. Not only did the law limit the protesting capability of the people, organizations were excluded from the law so they did not have to follow the law. The law applies to everyone or it applies to no one, there is no picking and choosing who has to follow the law. “The permit application comes with a $25 fee and must be submitted at least 30 days prior to the event. If denied, the permit-seeker can appeal. A new bill being submitted to the people of Bath that requires any event to pay a $25 permit fee and submit this permit to the town for approval of the event. This infringes on the first amendment right because if a protest were to break out then it would be classified as illegal whereas our first amendment right states that the American people have the right to protest at will. So a protest would have to be paid for, and approved, 30 days before the protest would happen. That is illogical as protests happen all the time without warning. Some are planned and others are spontaneous. Some places and groups are exempt from this law as they host so many events, they would be billing them too much for their group to exist. The law either applies to everyone or no one at all” (Portland Press Herald Dec. 7 2019). Things change over time, like laws, television, and the weather. The media like all things change over time.
The media has become a different entity in the post 2000 years. The news presented is not the same as it was in the pre-2000 years. In the pre-2000’s the news gave more sources and gave more time references. There have been many teams that try to investigate the change in the news but the RAND team has seemed to hit the nail right on the head. “The RAND team found that much of the language and tone of reporting in the New York Times, Washington Post, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch remained constant over the past 30 years, but the team also found quantifiable changes in certain linguistic areas between the pre-2000 and post-2000 periods. For example, the three newspapers’ reporting before 2000 used language that was more heavily event- and context-based than it was in stories written after 2000; pre-2000 stories also contained more references to time, official titles, and positions and institutions and used more descriptive, elaborative language to provide story details. In contrast, the team found that post-2000 reporting engaged in more storytelling and emphasized interactions, personal perspective, and emotion more heavily than did stories in the pre-2000 period” (rand.org, Facts vs. Opinions: How the News Is Changing in the Digital Age. 1). The Media has become the one thing it can not be. It presents false information by creating titles that are untrue and choosing which parts of the story to tell to satisfy their bottom dollar. “Broadcast television journalism exhibited similar differences in the pre-2000 and post-2000 samples. The RAND team’s text analysis found a gradual shift in broadcast television coverage from more-conventional reporting in the pre-2000 period, during which news stories tended to use precise and concrete language and often turned to public sources of authority, to more-subjective coverage after 2000, when news stories relied less on concrete language and more on unplanned speech, expression of opinions, interviews, and arguments” (rand.org, Facts vs. Opinions: How the News Is Changing in the Digital Age. 1).
Our Social Media platforms have long been involved in presenting a one sided message to their audiences. Their practice of creating and using mathematical formulas - algorithms, to create a messaging platform that can influence the readers thought process. The unfortunate piece of this information is that readers today are not provided all of the information allowing them to develop their own interpretation of the information. This creates a society of thoughtless drones that only believe what they hear and see.
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